Magic Street- Orson Scott Card

Magic Street
By: Orson Scott Card
Hardcover: 416 pages
Publisher: Del Rey ( June 28, 2005) 
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0345416899
ISBN-13: 978-0345416896
Read it or not: Read it!

From the publishers website: 

(Abbreviated due to spoilers) 

In a peaceful, prosperous African American neighborhood in Los Angeles, Mack Street is a mystery child who has somehow found a home. Discovered abandoned in an overgrown park, raised by a blunt-speaking single woman, Mack comes and goes from family to family–a boy who is at once surrounded by boisterous characters and deeply alone. But while Mack senses that he is different from most, and knows that he has strange powers, he cannot possibly understand how unusual he is until the day he sees, in a thin slice of space, a narrow house. Beyond it is a backyard–and an entryway into an extraordinary world stretching off into an exotic distance of geography, history, and magic.

Review, spoiler free!

Mack Street is a black boy born in a unusual nature who posses magical powers. He lives on Magic Street with his adoptive mother profoundly affecting the lives of his entire neighborhood. He embodies the concept of 'be careful what you wish for'. 

 I found the overarching theme of the story to be somewhat formulaic: abandoned boy of magical nature must undertake a quest and he succeeds in an unlikely manner. That being said, it is an formula for a reason and Card makes use of it as a scaffolding in order to create a beautiful, unusual building. Card has done what few SF/Fantasy authors dare to do- he has created a novel entirely populated by black characters. The protagonist is a black male that was abandoned and is now being raised by a single mother. ** ( I'm not going to get into the racial stereotypes that this is touching on yet). The neighborhood that he lives in is prosperous. Most of the people that live there are nuclear families and he is basically adopted by the whole neighborhood.  But he is black and I can't emphasize that enough. Neither can Orson Scott Card. He makes it very obvious that the culture that he is describing is 'black culture' *see spoiler 1 *. I must admit, that I got this book and didn't read it for a while- I have read other 'urban fantasy novels' that focus on the fact that the characters are black and forget to develop them as characters. I was pleasantly surprised to find that this was not the case with Magic Street. Mack Street was a character that I could relate to. He struggled with feelings of loneliness, abandonment, of not knowing his place. These feelings  transcend culture and race. 


The rest of the preview- with spoilers! 

Passing through the skinny house that no one else can see, Mack is plunged into a realm where time and reality are skewed, a place where what Mack does and sees seem to have strange affects in the “real world” of concrete, cars, commerce, and conflict. Growing into a tall, powerful young man, pursuing a forbidden relationship, and using Shakespeare’s Midsummer’s Night Dream as a guide into the vast, timeless fantasy world, Mack becomes a player in an epic drama. Understanding this drama is Mack’s challenge. His reward, if he can survive the trip, is discovering not only who he really is . . . but why he exists.

Both a novel of constantly surprising entertainment and a tale of breathtaking literary power, Magic Street is a masterwork from a supremely gifted, utterly original American writer–a novel that uses realism and fantasy to delight, challenge, and satisfy on the most profound levels.


Review chock full of spoilers- delicious!

*spoiler 1* In the author's note Card reveals that the neighborhood described is based on an actual neighborhood in L.A. and that he spoke to both neighborhood residents and his black friends. He says this in a much more politically correct manner than I do. 

We first meet Mack Street when he is found abandoned in a plastic bag near an old sewer pipe. He is found by Cecee who in turns brings him to a single nurse Ura Lee Smitcher. Together Cecee and Ura raise Mack. Or attempt to. Mack takes to wandering the streets. He begins to have dreams about the wishes of his neighbors - and through him they come true. Although not in the way that he would like. One of his neighbors loves to swim and dreams of being a fish. She is found within her parents water bed, half drowned.

The book then turns into A Midsummer Night's Dream. Puck enters, and Mack street learns that he is actually a part of the faery realm and must free the Queen of faery Tatiana. Freeing her leads to a colossal battle with her estranged spouse - Oberon. In the end it turns out that  Mack Street is really all of the good parts of Oberon, his conscience that Oberon got rid of in order to get more power. That part got a little weird. 

Mack Street is in some sense the stereotypical black youth- abandoned, raised by a single mother, a wanderer. But at the same time, Card moves away from this stereotype. Mack Street is a beloved member of his community, he is a crusader in the fight against evil, he is rooted in his neighborhood though he may wander within it. . I'm not sure Card was thinking about these stereotypes as he was writing but I couldn't help thinking about them while reading. Card very clearly made the protagonist black, but he did not make his blackness the entire focus of the novel. I think that overall he struck a good balance between illuminating racial issues and weaving a fantasy tale. 

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